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A review of Wayne Koestenbaum’s Ultramarine

DANIEL SWAIN

At 472 pages, Wayne Koestenbaum’s latest volume of poetry attests his self-described logorrhea. Ultramarine (Nightboat Books) is the third volume in his Trance Notebook trilogy, after The Pink Trance Notebooks (2015) and Camp Marmalade (2018). Taken together, they run to over 1500 pages. For almost a decade, Koestenbaum has composed the notebooks at his desk each morning, transcribing a tissue of associations (dreams, memories, thoughts) from an unfiltered state of consciousness. According to Koestenbaum, the resultant poems are merely a “distillation” of these original longform drafts. As he told Felix Bernstein, he “obey[s] the order in which the thought-clusters [appear] to [him], without radical reorganizing.” If the idea is that poems are unworried, unstudied, unprocessed, I don’t really believe him (I don’t think he expects me to). The vast scale…

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The American Poetry Review (Digital) - 1 Issue, September/October 2022

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